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Protect Your Good Ideas

By Sonja Carberry

You've come up with a great product and put it on the market. Almost immediately people are imitating or even stealing your idea. What to do? Details on protecting what's yours:

• Assemble a team. Billed as a "backyard in a box," the Pet Loo invented by Tobi Skovron and his wife, Simone, lets dogs do their business indoors on a hygienic, synthetic-grass-covered box. Before dropping the Pet Loo on the marketplace in 2003, the couple surrounded themselves with an arsenal of experts who'd "been there, done that," Tobi Skovron told IBD.

The board of directors they gathered included licensing and patent attorneys as well as accountants and industrial engineers.

"Go and seek legal advice right off the bat," Skovron said. "You really need to seek out people with the right areas of expertise."

• Cover every angle. Skovron's company, Pup-Pee Solutions, has since added new products to its lineup and expanded its market to 73 regions around the world. Skovron patents and trademarks each product as it's developed. "We have invested heavily in our intellectual property," he said.

• Fight the good fight. Skovron has legal proceedings under way against a couple of imitators.

"I will use every dollar I have and more to chase down someone who decides to rip me off," Skovron said. "It's not just me. I've got 60 other people (employees) to think of."

• Pick a weapon. Patent or trademark? Is one better than the other? It depends on your objective, says Oliver Herzfeld, chief legal officer at Beanstalk Group, a brand licensing firm. "Patents protect the inventor," he said. "A trademark is basically protecting the (product) name."

In other words, patents prevent competitors from re-creating your product for 20 years. A trademark prevents them from using your product's name for as long as you're in business. "If you fail to use your trademark in commerce for a certain period of time, you lose your rights," Herzfeld said.

• Keep your secrets. Bug Bam's inventor and president, Joseph Symond, chose to trademark everything about his all-natural mosquito-repellent wristband rather than patent it.

With the latter, "you have to put down every single part of the process," he said. "It becomes like an instruction book on how to create my product." He plans to keep that secret for the long run.

• Watch for squatters. People don't just steal business ideas. They can ride on another firm's coattails. That's what happened to Symond.

"A competitor hacked into my Web site and put their TV commercial on my Web site," Symond said. "I'm filing my first lawsuit ever in my life."

• Beat your drum. Besides legal wrangling, Symond devotes energy to teaching consumers why his repellent is safe and effective. "All the advertising I do is focused on educating the customer," he said.

While his blog may have a limited audience, it has a long reach.

"That blog gets picked up (and re-posted) by multiple sources," Symond said. "I write it more like a public service announcement with real facts and figures."